I think I’ve done a fairly thorough job in, for instance, this essay for The National in showing the similarities between the Iraq troop surge and the Afghanistan extended surge. To belabor the point, this Tuesday post drew on Gen. Petraeus’ “transition to overwatch” concept to explicate the transition between phases one and two of the Afghanistan security strategy. So I think my bona fides are in place to say that half of this David Sanger piece is an excellent exploration of the similarities and the other half is disappointing, timewasting superficiality. For instance:

No one in the Obama White House voices much admiration for the inheritance left by Mr. Bush, so it was probably unintentional that when the Afghanistan strategy was announced on Tuesday, the rollout had echoes of the earlier one. Mr. Bush’s fact sheet on the surge carried the headline “The New Way Forward in Iraq.” Mr. Obama’s speech carried the title “The Way Forward in Afghanistan and Pakistan.”

Is that really so relevant, man? You don’t need to pad your piece when you’ve got stuff like this:

Both surges aimed to knock back an insurgency that had gained territory and caused high casualties, and to buy time and space to train local forces for combat. “Neither one of these surges,” said one officer involved in both decisions, “was born to exploit success. They were designed to reverse momentum.”

That’s an overlooked point and a useful, precise concept. The virtue of Sanger’s piece is how well it explicates the differences between Iraq and Afghanistan and the subsequent skepticism it casts on a template strategy.